Camera Indica in the New Millennium

As World Photography Day approaches, we take a look at the shifts in Indian photography over the past decade.

By Sourajit Saha

Christopher Pinney, in his book The Coming of Photography to India, makes a very interesting statement – ‘If nineteenth-century Indian photography’s paradigmatic location was the Himalayan foothills, in the twentieth-century photography’s preferred location became the street.’ Taking a cue from this defining proclamation, I take the liberty of saying that twenty-first-century Indian photography’s location goes beyond the urban landscape to the digital realm. Post-independence India saw the dominance of photojournalistic practices in the Indian photography scene, with photojournalists like Raghu Rai becoming a household name, which was quite unimaginable earlier, as photography was mostly considered to be for the elites, by the elites. Photography became accessible to the general public in the twentieth century with the rise of press photography. Interestingly, India has been progressive about her women leading the photographic practice from a very early stage. A prime example is a Parsi woman named Homai Vyrawallah, who started documenting the Indian Independence movement for leading publications like The Illustrated Weekly of India, Life, and others. She is often proclaimed as the first woman photojournalist in India. The decades starting from the 1930s to 1970s saw a host of photojournalists doing exceptional work, be it Sunil Janah, a CPI-appointed photojournalist who roamed around the country photographing famines, tribal lives, and significant moments of Indian history, or Kulwant Roy with his brilliant images of nationalist leaders of the Indian Independence movement, or Kishore Parekh with his gritty images of the Bangladesh Liberation War. In the years to come, with the rise of the India Today group, Raghu Rai and later Prashant Panjiar depicted the India of the 80s, the 90s, and the post-liberalization era via extensive cover stories. Raghu brought Cartier Bresson’s precision and the American street photographer’s (Joel Meyerowitz, Garry Winogrand) keen observational skills to Indian photography. With the turn of the century, the Indian photographer’s subject of interest changed along with the aesthetics. What was limited to a few photographers experimenting with the documentary form suddenly found its resonance amongst a host of new-generation photographers with sensibilities and training different from its previous generation.

As the 21st century began, we saw photographers like Sohrab Hura producing projects delving into matters that are deeply personal to the artist himself. Life is Elsewhere, which came out as a self-published photo book in 2015, portrayed his complex relationship with his schizophrenic mother through visceral gritty images that remind one of the works of the Provoke Generation photographer Diado Moriyama. Hura, at quite an early age, became a Magnum Photographer, being the only Indian photographer other than Raghu Rai to be a member of the prestigious agency. Dayanita Singh, who started out as a photojournalist, shifted to the documentary form with intimate works on the famous tabla maestro Zakir Hussain as she followed him for six winters. She was not interested in the public life of Hussain on stage but in his private life, documenting the rigorous process of an Indian classical musician doing his daily riyaaz. She also brought the depiction of the queer community into Indian photography with her book on an eunuch, named Myself Mona Ahmed, another work whose inception was in a photojournalistic assignment.

Kushal Ray, a sports journalist turned photographer, who has in his book Intimacies, documented a family that had adopted him and cared for him through tuberculosis, not only upheld a complex and important entity in Indian social structure — the joint family, but also made an extremely personal work concerning an adopted family.

Photography in India was becoming more personal with the turn of the century, something which the West had seen back in the 80s. Nan Goldin’s The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1985) comes to mind, a slideshow presentation at MoMA in New York, which lay bare the post-Woodstock drug-addict subculture in the late 70s and 80s with the photographer pushing the boundaries of what can and cannot be photographed while depicting oneself. A searing image of herself with a black eye, hinting at a rough night, has now become an iconic image from that work. Other prominent examples include Larry Sultan’s glossy depiction of the American dream in his Pictures from Home (1992) or Richard Billingham turning his camera at his alcoholic father Ray, resulting in Ray’s A Laugh (1996), bringing forth a personal portrait of a British family in post-Thatcherian UK. The photographic works from India pertaining to the personal paradigm that come to one’s mind are Umrao Singh Shergil’s experimentations with the self, resulting in arresting self-portraits and portraits of his daughter, the enigmatic painter Amrita Shergil, and works of Pablo Bartholomew’s Outside In: A Tale of Three Cities showing the private lives of his friends, lovers and acquaintances in the 80s in the three foremost metro cities of India – Delhi, Bombay, Calcutta. Jyoti Bhatt, a painter and printmaker, also delved into photography – in excellent black and white images, he photographed himself and his artist friends from MSU Baroda.

The 2010s witnessed a little more experimentation with form and subject. At the same time, the easy accessibility and ergonomics of a DSLR enabled a host of photographers to take to the streets. This gave way to a lot of street photographers thronging the streets for the elusive ‘Decisive Moment.’ Some did pretty well, garnering a dedicated base of followers measured on the basis of a huge number of social media ‘likes’ and ‘shares.’ But these were mostly single images that didn’t go beyond the initial shock value, making use of compositional elements like balancing, layering, and juxtaposition. It requires a separate piece of study on how resorting to such limiting photographic techniques inspired a generation of photographers to explore the streets of India for a decade. But the 2010s also saw the extension and moulding of the documentary form, the seeds of which were sown in the earlier decades. Ronny Sen’s End of Time (2017) looked at the environmental and human devastation caused by the Jharia coal mines. Witness (2023), written by Sanjay Kak, charted the development of documentary photography in the Kashmir Valley over the last few decades. A host of photographers who were essentially photojournalists, like Showkat Nanda, Sumit Dayal, and Altaf Qadri, started developing documentary projects spanning years, focussed on politically volatile areas. 

Photography in India in the past decade mostly leaned towards photographers developing their personal projects, most of them long documentary works covering subjects concerning personal stories, queer narratives, to hardcore political and environmental issues. I spoke to four Calcutta-based photographers – Arko Datto, Shan Bhattacharya, Soumya Sankar Bose, and Alakananda Nag – who have mostly begun or produced the bulk of their works in the past decade, to understand the concerns of Indian photography and how it was shaped in the last decade and a half. The accessibility of the internet led to the development of the visual internet culture, and resulted in artworks based on the overflowing bombardment of images online. Arko Datto, a Calcutta-based image practitioner, was one of the first to notice this phenomenon, which led to projects like Cybersex and  CaptiveCams . While Cybersex required Arko to spend hours looking at individuals publicly streaming sessions of their sexual activities and taking screenshots of these sessions, CaptiveCams was made out of stills from the footage captured by CCTVs installed in zoos from all over the world.

Arko believes that his academic background in science is the reason why he started looking at the emerging internet culture, and how technology shaped human experience and behaviour. He states that the accessibility of the subjects has never been a privilege for him since he mostly worked with publicly available resources. He says he was inspired by the works with found footage using Google Street View which was happening back when he began in 2012. Street photographers like Jon Rafman, Michael Wolf, Doug Rickard started redefining the idea of street photography using Google Street View. Ranging from bizarre to familiar scenes, these photographs became a testament to the fact that nothing now evades the roving eyes of photographers. Talking about the same burden of online visuals, Shan says that ‘It is difficult for image makers of today to get rid of the massive amount of subconscious visual burden they’re exposed to every day.’ He feels that there’s more chance of them discovering ‘even their most personal experiences and ideas have prior representation in existing image repositories .’Shan himself worked with found footage – an Austrian family’s domestic and travel photographs from the 1960s – and repurposed them to create an audio-visual presentation titled TAGTRAUMVERSCHWÖRUNG (A Daydream Conspiracy)¹².

When asked how image-making has changed in the last decade, Soumya’s response hinted at the evolution of society as the source of material for the development of contemporary photography. ‘When I started my journey twelve years ago, the advent of social media was a relatively new phenomenon, and people were excited to have their presence felt on all those platforms. But now we’ve realised it is nothing but a trap.’

Speaking of traps, Arko expressed his qualms about these trends within photography — ‘once it was family albums, then archives, then photo-fiction. I’m tired of these trends.’ Shan used this very technique of photo-fiction in his book Portal (2020)¹³, depicting the journey of a fictional character named Achintya Bose who searches for a mysterious woman whose image crops up every now and then in various encounters spanning a century – be it a studio photograph or magazines, family albums, newspapers, books. The book has been conceptualised in the form of a diary with the web of intrigue created out of a fictional archive of sorts – an object which encompasses all these trends that Arko talks about. Photography, which started off as a scientific tool to gather evidence for scientific investigations and for public and state records, eventually broke away from the constraints of depicting objective reality and transformed into a tool for creating fictional worlds. 

The advent of new technologies like AI and AR/VR is compelling artists to look at image-making in completely new ways. A recently concluded exhibition titled ‘Braiding Dusk and Dawn’ by Soumya Sankar Bose at the Delfina Foundation, tracing the artist’s own family history concerning the disappearance of his mother, uses a 360° VR work and a three-channel video installation. Soumya wrote to me, ‘I always find it exciting – how technologies bring in unique possibilities for creating new content. And that is what is most important to me, rather than the technology itself.’

Arko is still wary of using technologies like AI. He says, ‘We are in a phase where it’s growing. It’s in a nascent phase. This phase is not meaningful for me. Once a technology matures, it is of use to me.’ He wants to give it time to be ‘mature’ and ‘stable.’ He adds, ‘I will work with AI when the ‘wow’ factor has gone. The point of making art is that it stands the test of time, and with the rise of new technologies, the chances of that decrease.’ Shan warns us, ‘What’s truly alarming about AI-generated image-making, a technology which can produce so much quantity in so little time, is its exclusivity in the hands of a few corporations. Because of their superior hardware and server support, personalised AI trained by independent researchers is being integrated into their own existing models. This is creating a homogeneity that’s likely to prevail in the popular culture aesthetic in the coming years.’ But he is also keen to try out these new technologies if he can learn them and put them to good use. He also expresses concerns about how the advent of newer forms of image-making is a threat to traditional forms of photography as it increases the cost of using the earlier forms. 

Speaking of the economic means to sustain such a cost and time-intensive art form, the photographers said they have to either resort to commercial work – like working for magazines, or have a different vocation altogether. Arko even states that in recent years, editorial photo assignments have diminished too. Arko and others, like Chirodeep Chaudhuri, Ishan Tankha, or Ritesh Uttamchandani, worked for publications such as Caravan, OPEN, and Tehelka, which were burgeoning in the early 2010s but slowly started replacing the detailed photo features they used to publish with stock images off the internet. The democratization of the media and the easy availability of free images on the internet, in a way, took away the vocation of such talented and dedicated photographers. Alakananda Nag self-published a photobook titled ‘Armenians of Calcutta’ with the support of the Indian Foundation of the Arts, a Bangalore-based organization known for supporting Indian artists through grants.

When I asked her if grants and support from institutions are the only ways left, she said she doesn’t believe so. She agrees that it’s very difficult to sustain if one only works on a long photographic project like the one she did (she had been working on it for a decade), but she suggests having a job and channeling the money to the personal project if one wants to do something truly independent. Otherwise, a lot of compromises have to be made unless one finds a grant with no strings attached. Arko resonates with Alaka on this and adds that he is disillusioned with these grant-making bodies due to their modus operandi. He feels that Western institutions are better in this regard as they are less interfering. But he doesn’t depend on such grants and is now in a place where his own archive of work has started generating revenue through print sales and exhibitions. He also credits the low cost of living and working in a city like Kolkata for helping him sustain himself without much institutional support. He also adds that the internet has given him and others the opportunity to reach out to a wider audience. Selling work through the internet has helped him stay close to his parents and still have a career in the arts. 

There has been an increase in the making and dissemination of photobooks in India over the last two decades, specifically the last decade. One can say that this began with Dayanita Singh popularizing the photobook as a site of both archive and exhibition. She made a photobook with her first project, on Zakir Hussain, way back in the 80s. Later on, we see a plethora of photobooks, from Hura’s Life is Elsewhere to recent ones, including the Alkazi Photobook Grant 2017 winner Rohit Saha’s 1528 on the complex political history of Manipur. I asked Alaka what she thinks of the photobook market here in India. She believes that the market is definitely changing. ‘There are so many young photographers taking up the daunting task of publishing a photobook. It’s a wonderful phenomenon.’ She also spoke of the various photobook stores cropping up, like Editions Jojo and Offset Projects, which are making it easy for photographers to make their photobooks in India. Alaka added that she is grateful to Offset Projects for helping her book reach various international photo festivals and forums.

Soumya thinks that ‘.. the market is better outside India because the photobook market has been created by them and not by us. Indeed, India is the market for various other art productions, but the photobook is more of a Western-influenced medium.’ Arko has had his books published by agencies in France and Italy as they were willing to do so. He doesn’t want to get into the hassle of self-publishing and feels there’s a lack of infrastructure to disseminate photobooks in India. ‘The photobook market is growing abroad because the individual economic strength of the people makes good quality photo books affordable. If the cost goes down, the quality of the photo book will also suffer. Photobooks are bound to be expensive for people in a country like ours where the average daily income is so low.’ Arko feels there’s still a lack of an ecosystem in this country for photography to be flourishing. Soumya is more hopeful as he feels that more galleries in India are now supporting photography than ever before. ‘Still, the market is not as big as it is in Europe or America yet, but that would not in any way stop us from continuing our work.’

Soumya’s statement expresses a sense of resolution and integrity to this very personal medium of art, which still hasn’t found its footing in our country despite its early inception compared to other nations. The lack of a well-functioning ecosystem has hindered the flourishing of the medium to the growth of an audience comprising people from all stratas of Indian society. The dearth of proper photographic courses in Indian academia is another reason for the aversion to serious appreciation and awareness about the medium. Despite the regular participation of Indian photographers in prestigious photography contests across the globe, there’s no structure to the funding mechanism that supports the photographers, nor are there any government-organized festivals to popularize the medium and its practitioners among the masses. As we near the first quarter of the century, it is about time we give photography its due.

(Cover photo from Sohrab Hura’s Life is Elsewhere. Courtesy: Magnum Photos)